Kyary Pamyu Pamyu Takes Pop Beyond Cute

Earlier this year, researchers discovered that our ability to perform critical tasks is heightened when we’ve been “primed” by exposure to cuteness. That’s because we experience significant psychobiological changes when we encounter cute things — our heartrate drops, we become more attentive, more focused. Cuteness is addictive. And therapeutic.

Naturally, the authors of the study — Hiroshi Nittono, Michiko Fukushima, Akihiro Yano, Hiroki Moriya — are residents of the global capital of cute: Japan. No place in the world is more obsessed with cute, and no culture has woven cuteness more deeply into its social fabric. Cute images and mascots are everywhere, from police kiosks and public libraries to bathrooms and ballparks. The standard of female beauty (and, it must be said, male good looks too) is focused on “cute” rather than “sexy” or “beautiful,” with most top idols being small, slender, round-faced and wide-eyed; they look like schoolgirls, and many of them are.

Cute and Japan are synonymous, which is why the Japanese business and government establishment has also chosen cuteness as a key tool its attempts to boost tourism and exports. In June, Japan’s Diet approved the creation of a 50 billion yen grants fund dedicated to investing in the promotion of everything from anime to cosplay to Gothic Lolita fashion. All Nippon Airways, Japan’s biggest airline, just renewed its sponsorship of a massive marketing campaign, “Cool Japan,” that highlights Japan’s multifaceted pop culture attractions — with an entire tab devoted to “kawaii,” the Japanese word for cute.

If you click into that tab, and it’s almost impossible to resist doing so, the first thing you’re likely to see is the smiling visage of the officially designated “Kawaii Ambassador of Harajuku,” a waifish young woman with an impossible name: Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. (“To tell the truth, even Japanese people can’t pronounce it,” says Chika Anyoji, a representative from Kyary’s record label, Warner Music Japan.)

Twenty-year-old Kyary, née Kiriko Takemura, is the hottest thing in Japanese pop music — perhaps in all of Japanese pop culture — today. Her fresh face graces the covers of fashion and lifestyle magazines targeting demographics from street kids to housewives. She wallpapers television and radio, and she’s an inescapable presence on billboards and standup displays all across Tokyo. But it’s on the Internet where Kyary’s dominance is most evident: She has over 1.6 million followers, making her Japan’s most popular celebrity on Twitter, and her music videos on YouTube regularly top 10 million views, with one of them — for her debut single “PonPonPon” — crossing over into global viral status with over 52 million views.

Kyary’s success is both a testament to the power of cute, and a subversive response to it. At first glance, she seems virtually indistinguishable from the hundreds of other young, pretty pop icons that the Japanese celebrity machine stamps out like clockwork. (The “idol army” AKB48, perhaps Kyary’s biggest rival for pop mindshare, consists of close to a hundred teenaged performers, organized into subunits that train and entertain with near-military precision, 365 days a year.)